


Reach for the Stars

by LaMarwy



Category: Proxima 2019
Genre: Drama, Gen, Post Movie, flashfic, space mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-11-08 07:21:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20831561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaMarwy/pseuds/LaMarwy
Summary: 28 years old Stella is about to leave for her first Space Mission.





	Reach for the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Proxima is not out yet, but the waiting is killing me and I've got so many feelings already; all I can do, however, is producing a sad piece. It appears that I have some sort of drama gene in me - I am aware of this - so please don't hate me for the fic, because I already hate myself. Enjoy?

fandom: Proxima, 2019  
character: Stella Loreau  
set: post-movie  
words count: 620

Reach for the Stars

The first time her mother went on a mission, Stella was only a child. She could barely wrap her head around the thought of Sarah going into space for a year, leaving her daughter behind. She had been scared - terrified, to tell the truth - not just a little bit as she told, but she never confessed her mother that.

Once, during a hot summer night, months before the news of her departure, Stella had caught her mother on the balcony of their house. She wasn't doing anything special, she was just staring at the sky.  
Millions and millions of white dots flickered into her eyes and none of them were the lights of the city below them. The moon shone with its silver beams on her fair skin, and at that moment, Stella realized that her mother was not a common woman. Surrounded by a dim glow that only a child could see, magical and fairylike, Sarah appeared to her eyes like nothing more than a star creature. Somehow, Sarah didn't belong to the earth. Stella wanted to see her mother happy, flying away into that black, scary, infinite blackness of the universe, fulfilling her dream, and she knew that someday she would have to let Sarah go.

And she did, eventually - she had to.

When Sarah came back, she hugged her tightly, a one year older girl who had almost forgotten the smell of her hair and the warmth of her skin. Sarah had promised not to leave again.

But then she broke her promise. As she told Stella about the first men's sacrifice so that others could reach for the stars, the girl had listened to her words like they were part of a fairytale, not knowing that, years later, the same story would become of her mother's.

Stella had always looked up at the sky and imagined it as the big, black creature that had swallowed her mother without any explanation, and now she was about to face the same beast after years of hard training and sacrifices and remorses that made her feel closer to Sarah than she thought possible.

When they asked if she was ready, she'd said _yes_ and, on the same day, she'd gone downtown and got a tattoo, the itching pain a mere memento of the greater good to which her mother had had to submit and to which she had to bow her head, long time before Stella.

Today, she was about to leave. On the very mission that carried her mother's name along with the ones of the other members of her crew. With the same patched flag that her mother wore with honor on her left arm.

It had been hard, alone, but she'd done it.

Sarah would've been proud. Stella was proud to be her daughter.

She would follow her mother's steps and, perhaps, she would join her on the moon, where she promised she would wait for her daughter if something would have ever gone wrong.

Her mother would always be her hero, and now, she would always be with her too.

Stella sighed. It felt like only a day had passed from the last time she'd seen her mother leaving, never to come back. Now she was about to join her up there, scared as few and happy beyond the farthest star - now she was really the closest to her mother than she'd ever been.  
She pulled up the sleeves of her suit, just enough to take one last glance of her wrists. She smiled: as Sarah used to do when she was just a child, casting away the monsters under her bed, her mother would always protect her. Everything would be fine.

_**Ad Astra Per Aspera** __A Rough Road Leads to the Stars_.

**Author's Note:**

> ref.: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/LC34plaque2.jpg


End file.
